


...and the Avian of Darkness

by burglebezzlement



Category: Down in the Library Basement - Rona Vaselaar | sleepyhollow_101, The Librarians (TV 2014)
Genre: Crossover, F/F, Halloween, Libraries, Monster of the Week, Nighttime, Thunderstorms, ToT: Monster Mash, Trick or Treat: Chocolate Box, Witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-21 15:23:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12460536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/burglebezzlement/pseuds/burglebezzlement
Summary: Cassandra Cillian doesn't know that her new girlfriend, Cassie, has magical creatures living in her library basement. Cassie doesn't know that Cassandra works for the Library. When the Library's clippings book brings Cassandra to Cassie's library, things get complicated.





	...and the Avian of Darkness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [escritoireazul](https://archiveofourown.org/users/escritoireazul/gifts).



> No magical creatures from either canon are harmed in this fic.
> 
> For the arachnophobic, please be aware that the creatures from Down in the Library Basement are rather spider-like. Also, the characters refer to them as “J'ba Fofi,” a cryptid from the Congo that’s similar to the creatures from Down in the Library Basement. I would suggest not Googling the term if you dislike spiders.

Cassandra and I met at a dive bar in Portland.

It was my last night in town. I’d driven out to my old house to pick up the last of my stuff. My housemates had agreed to keep most of my furniture — they were using it, and I wouldn’t have room for it in my room at my parents’ house in Minnesota anyway. So it was just a lot of boxes of books and stuff to cram into the back of my car. 

Once I was done packing, my old housemates insisted on taking me out for a beer. I figured I’d crash on the couch for the night and leave in the morning, so I followed them down to the bar at the end of the street.

She showed up an hour or so in. Red hair, a polka-dot cardigan over a dress with a full skirt, and shoes with a strap across the instep — she looked like the popular perception of a librarian, instead of what actual librarians look like. Me, I was wearing a flannel shirt and my oldest jeans. It was a surprise when she sat down at the bar next to me.

“Hey,” she said. “I’m Cassandra.”

“Cassie.”

We got to talking, mostly about mathematics — I wrote a piece last year on New Math, and it turned out Cassandra had opinions on that. I didn’t even realize she was interested in more than math until the end of the night, when she asked me if she could call.

“I’m moving tomorrow,” I said, awkwardly. I wondered if she’d think I’d been leading her on. It hadn’t occurred to me that she might be thinking of it that way.

“Oh! Where are you moving to?” she asked.

“You’ve probably never heard of it.”

She just kept her head tilted, and I relented. “Rock County, Minnesota. I know, you’ve never heard of it. Nobody’s ever heard of it.”

“I travel a lot for work,” she said. “Can I call you? Sometime? If I’m in the area?”

“Sure.” 

I’d have said yes anyway. You don’t meet a lot of eligible lesbians in rural Minnesota.

She kissed me goodnight, outside the bar, under the street light. It was a great kiss. I told myself she wouldn’t call, but as I walked back to my old house, I found myself hoping I was wrong.

* * *

She called the next day, when I was halfway across Montana, and told me she was going to be in my area the next weekend for a conference. Which was weird — the closest thing Rock County has to a conference center is the Holiday Inn & Suites down in the county seat, and they haven’t had anything I thought might attract someone like Cassandra in years. 

I still said yes. I didn’t even ask about her job.

I didn’t ask about a lot of things.

Somehow, Cassandra kept “finding herself in the area” or being “on her way through,” until I stopped asking and she stopped coming up with excuses. I knew she wasn’t commuting from Portland to date me. It’s a 25 hour drive. Maybe she lived in Minneapolis, or was crashing with someone who lived there. That’s only 2 hours.

There were other things, too. She held her hands up and waved them in the air whenever she had to do math in her head, like she was looking at a computer display I couldn’t see. And she never told me about her job. Sometimes she’d say she worked with math, or in artifact recovery, or in research, but she never told me what she actually did all day. The scraps she did tell me didn’t fit together. Her stories about her firm, fair boss and her flaky boss and her mentor and her two coworkers all seemed real enough, but she never told me enough to put together what they actually did.

Also, I never saw her car.

If you’re from the city, that won’t seem weird. But in a small town, you know everyone’s car. A car with out of state plates is something people talk about. But nobody ever talked about Cassandra’s car, even though she wasn’t living in Rock County and there wasn’t another way she could have been getting around.

I didn’t ask her about it. I think I didn’t want to know.

And I had my own secrets. I never told her why I sometimes had to go read out loud in the library basement before our dates.

* * *

Halloween’s not a big holiday in Rock County. It’s still mostly about the kids, which is why I spent the day overseeing library events. That night, my mother took the shift at home, handing out candy to trick or treaters, and I took the shift at the library, handing out candy to our library guardians down in the basement.

Jo and Pip, our two library guardians, were doing well. Pip had discovered chocolate — his mother, Jo, was never as interested in chocolate as she was in hard candies and Skittles, but Pip loved candy bars. The more chocolate, the better.

We’d been given a lot of Halloween candy that day, and I had saved it all up to give our library guardians a feast. A storm had come up, and I shut their window against the howling wind before settling into my chair with a copy of The Fall of the House of Usher. If the rain kept the trick or treaters away, all the candy me and my mother had bought would keep Pip and Jo well fed. 

Pip curled into my side, and I let one hand rest on his shaggy black fur while I read on. I had gotten to the Gothic archway, as the narrator entered the hall of the House of Usher, when I heard a door bang shut. The noise came from upstairs, in the library.

I froze. I had locked the doors, triple-checked them.

“I’ll be right back,” I told Pip and Jo. They’d be behind me as I walked up the stairs, but I didn’t know if they would follow me out of the basement.

My heart pounding, I opened the basement door, only to see —

“Cassandra?”

“Cassie!” Cassandra didn’t explain what she was doing here or how she’d gotten into the library, after hours, when I knew she didn’t have a key. “Cassie, are you okay?”

“What are you doing here?” I shut and locked the basement door behind me. “How did you get in?”

Cassandra bit her lower lip. “I can’t explain, but there’s something dangerous here.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “I’m safer in this library than anywhere else in the world.”

There was a flash of light, and two men came tumbling out of the men’s room door. “If the clippings book says something’s here, there’s something here,” the short one growled, and then he looked over at us. “Cassandra?”

I knew they hadn’t been there when we closed up. I checked every stall, every night. “Who are you?”

Cassandra looked away. “I — look, I can explain.”

“We’re Librarians,” the short one said.

“No, you’re not,” I said. I know a lot of librarians, and they looked nothing like any of them. “I’m the librarian here. And you’re trespassing.”

“Not that kind of librarian,” Cassandra said. “I’ve wanted to tell you, but there’s no time. Cassie, we’ve been told there’s something dangerous here.” She took a deep breath. “Something magical. And it could hurt you, so I need you to trust me, and then I promise, I’ll explain everything.”

She had to be talking about Jo and Pip. “You can’t hurt them,” I said. “They’re not dangerous. They’re our guardians.”

“Your guardians?” The taller guy looked at me like I had lost the plot. “You keep _lightning birds_ as guardians?”

I paused. “Lightning birds?”

There was a clap of thunder outside the library. It had been grumbling all evening, but now the heart of the storm seemed to be drawing closer, and the sound of the rain intensified. I thanked whatever powers there might be that we’d gotten the roof fixed.

“That thunder? That’s what we’re talking about,” the short guy said. “Cassandra —”

We all turned to look at her. She sighed. “We really are Librarians,” she said. “We just work at a different kind of library. A library for magic.”

I digested that. Before I met our library guardians, I might not have believed her. But after you’ve helped a group of librarians kill an ancient monster, it gets easier to believe.

“These are my coworkers,” Cassandra said. “Jake and Ezekiel.” 

Jake seemed to be the short one. He was looking around the library, like he thought I was hiding a magical bird behind a display of picture books. “There’s got to be a reason why it’s here,” he said. 

My mother always tells me I’m too easy to read, which is probably how Ezekiel knew to check the basement door. He opened it like I hadn’t even locked it, which I knew I had. After a moment looking down the basement steps, he slammed the door.

“You’ve got a J'ba Fofi?” His face was pale. “How did it get here?”

“They have names,” I snapped. “Pip and Jo. They’re our guardians.”

He and Jake exchanged glances. “Might explain the lightning bird,” Jake said. “They’re from the same region, right? Maybe the bird’s trying to eat the J'ba Fofi. Excuse me, the guardians.”

I imagined a bird big enough to eat one of our library guardians. “It’d have to be huge.”

“It is,” Cassandra said. She stepped over to me. “Don’t worry. That’s what we’re here for.”

“But what can you do about it?” I let Cassandra put her arm around me. Let my head fall against hers. Her hair was down, and I could smell her shampoo. “You’re not going to kill it, are you?”

“It’s not the bird’s fault,” Cassandra said gently. “It’s just in the wrong time. This is why I flaked out on you last week. Someone keeps bringing magical creatures through from other times. We haven’t been able to find them yet, because we’re still chasing after all the damage they’ve caused.”

Jake was at the windows, leaning in to look up at the sky. “We can send him back to his own time, but not without supplies, and I don’t know if we should try to get back to the Library right now. This storm is magical. The door might not reopen.”

Supplies — if there’s one thing a library has in stock, it’s random stuff that catches up in the staff breakroom, where nobody can explain it. 

I squared my shoulders. “What do you need?”

* * *

Salsifrey, lavender, and lemon balm were easy enough. My mother had led an herb gardening program that spring, and the herbs were still growing in neat pots out front. I sent Ezekiel out into the rain with strict instructions on what to look for.

The library’s children’s reading award is no longer handed out, because my mother feels that framing reading as a competition decreases the kids’ engagement in reading. But we still had the old silver-plated cup they used to hand out as a prize at the end of each year. I grabbed it for Cassandra to mix the herbs in, along with a bottle of solvent from the area where we fixed damaged books. 

The focusing crystal took me a moment, but then I remembered the program on healing crystals and Reiki that had been held a few weeks earlier. I thought it was nonsense at the time, but my mother always reminds me that our programming is about serving our patron’s interests. I mentally thanked her as we dug up one of the crystals from behind the reference desk. 

“I should do all my magic here.” Cassandra smiled at me from the floor, where she was using a Sharpie to draw a set of arcane symbols onto a large tarp left over from our renovations. “You’re better stocked than Jenkins.”

I started tearing open Red Zinger teabags from the staff tea area to separate out the dried hibiscus. “So this is really magic?”

I expected Cassandra to talk around it, but she didn’t. “It is,” she said. “I’ve wanted to tell you a hundred times, but I didn’t think you’d believe me.”

“I didn’t tell you about Jo and Pip.” I pulled open a few more teabags. “How did Ezekiel and Jake get here?”

“Magic door.” Cassandra squinted down at the tarp and made an adjustment.

“Guys?” Jake walked back from the front windows. “It’s getting closer.” A clap of thunder rattled the library. “We need to move.”

“And this is as good as it’s going to be,” Cassandra said. She dragged the tarp up and looked over at Ezekiel, who was trying to dry herbs in the tiny kitchen microwave, and then back at me. “You ready?”

I brushed the dried hibiscus into my hand, and nodded.

Jake said the bird was approaching from the front, so we went out the back exit, to the little park behind the library, where the town’s war memorial is. The wind and rain howled around the building. I ducked down, trying to keep as close as I could to the ground. All our Summer Outdoor Safety programs said not to go outside during a lightning storm.

But I trusted Cassandra. If she thought the lightning bird might be after Pip and Jo, there was no question. I had to protect our guardians.

Cassandra and Jake unfurled the tarp, holding it against the wind. They staked the edges into the grass with old card catalog spikes. Cassandra stuck the focusing crystal into the center of her pattern with some gum from our drawer of confiscated items, and then stepped back. 

I had been keeping the cup dry under my arm. When I handed it to her, she mashed the partially-dried herbs and hibiscus together, and then poured the solvent over the mixture. In spite of the lashing rain, a flickering blue flame rose from the cup. The smoke smelled like flowers and ashes.

Cassandra started chanting into the darkness. I didn’t recognize the language. 

That’s when Ezekiel pulled on my sleeve. “Guys —”

“Not now, Ezekiel,” Jake yelled over the storm, but Ezekiel ignored him. 

“It’s here,” he shouted.

There was a flash of lightning so bright, I couldn’t see. When my vision cleared, the lightning bird was already there: enormous, taller than any human, with a wingspan as wide as a house silhouetted against the library’s lights. Its feathers were speckled black and white, and electricity crackled along its wing tips.

Cassandra kept chanting, her voice calm while Jake, Ezekiel, and I watched the bird in terror. Finally, there was a tearing sound, and light shot up from the focusing crystal. A great rift opened in the air above the tarp. Through the rift, I could see star-shine. A clear night. 

We waited, crouched down at the edge of the park.

“He’s not going in,” Cassandra said. “Why isn’t he going in?”

The bird furled its wings and hopped along the edge of the library building. Jake shook his head. “Maybe he smells the things in the basement.”

“The gate won’t stay open for long,” Cassandra said. “What do we do?”

Pip and Jo. I had to protect them.

When the bird went beyond the far side of the library, I ran, ignoring Cassandra’s cries. I made it inside and slammed the door just before the bird returned. 

In the basement, Jo and Pip were shaking against the far wall. “We’re going to keep you safe,” I promised, and then ran back up the stairs.

I waited for the bird to circle again before running out the library’s back door. It had taken me a few minutes to find the airfoil kite we had used for the kid’s program the previous summer, and I just hoped it hadn’t taken too long. With shaking fingers, I tied the kite string to the gate on the far side of the war memorial, upwind of the bird, and let the wind drag the kite up into the air, next to the rift Cassandra had opened.

The lightning bird couldn’t have seem Jo and Pip — the weather had been clear the evening before, and Jo and Pip had been hidden down in the basement since then. So it must have sensed them another way. Smell, like Jake said, or maybe the taste of the wind.

In the winter, the library basement gets cold. Not freezing — the boiler’s down there, so there’s always a warm corner for Jo and Pip to retreat to. But the area with the reading light gets chilly, and my mother and I had started keeping an afghan down there. Once we saw how Jo and Pip liked snuggling into it, we left it for them. 

The afghan smelled like them. It was the only thing I could think of to do.

I grasped the kite string and tied the afghan firmly around it, knotting and double-knotting the fabric, but leaving enough of a tail to let the bird get the scent. Then I let the string unreel again, ignoring the burning as the string ripped across my palms.

I needed to get the kite in front of the rift.

Over by the library, the lightning bird cocked its head. I fought the kite, trying to keep the afghan where I needed it, praying that the lightning would hold off. That I wouldn’t be struck. I unreeled more string, trying to keep it in check, keep it where I needed it in the gusting wind.

Thunder clapped when the lightning bird spread its wings, and there was a rush of wind when it burst into the air. I dropped to the ground, the kite string still tangled in my hands, hoping against hope that my plan had worked. 

One more bright flash, and then there was only the sound of the rain.

“Cassie?” A hand touched my shoulder. Cassandra. “Are you — Cassie, please say something.”

I took a deep breath and rolled over. “Hey,” I said.

“Don’t _do_ that to me.” Cassandra dropped down, ignoring the mud, and kissed me. Her lips tasted like rainwater, and her hair was draggled underneath my fingers.

“You’re really okay?” she said when we finally broke apart.

“Promise.” I hugged her, and then let her help me up from the ground. My hands were stiff and bleeding from the kite string. 

On the way inside, I grabbed Jo and Pip’s afghan from the grass. It was soaked and muddy. I’d have to bring it home to wash.

There was a feather beside it, as long as my arm. I picked that up, too.

We went back into the library, where I dug up the first aid kit from behind the main desk and let Cassandra wash and bandage my hands. Outside, the rain was slowing.

I dropped the afghan by the door and thanked Ezekiel and Jake, who headed back through the men’s bathroom door in another flash of light.

There was a spare bag of Skittles in my bottom desk drawer. I grabbed it and led Cassandra over to the basement door.

“Come on,” I said. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

* * *

Things are back to normal at the library, or what passes for normal around here.

The next weekend, Cassandra came to dinner at my house. She brought a book with her. It had a buckram library binding, but I didn’t recognize the format of the call number on its spine. Inside, it had information on our guardians. Their natural diet, predators, care — it was everything we’d pieced together in our time caring for our guardians and then some. 

We’ve told my mother some of what happened, and I suspect she guesses the rest. I also wonder if she's tangled with the Librarians before. When Cassandra told her, my mother whispered _Judson_ under her breath. Whoever he is, I wonder if he has anything to do with a J'ba Fofi showing up in a library basement in Minnesota.

My mother took the lead on copying and distributing the information on the library guardians to the other libraries where Jo’s children live. She’s agreed to keep Cassandra’s secret, so she told them it was reference material she found through inter-library loan. But I think they may suspect.

I keep the lightning bird’s feather on my desk, as a reminder of how much more is out there in the world. Sometimes, when it’s dark, there’s a faint crackle of blue light over the edges of the feather. 

As for me and Cassandra, we’re still together. Now that I know Cassandra has a magic door, we spend a lot more time together. We’re even talking about moving in, since Cassandra can commute to her Library by magic. We haven’t made any decisions yet, but I’ve got my eye on an old tumble-down Victorian on the edge of town, with a full basement with lots of shadows where a guardian could live.


End file.
